Richard Rorty and John N Gray

To revisit 'The Silence of Animals' (2013),  is to renew respect for Gray's approach to the big dilemmas.    But what does he say about 'mind',  you may ask?

" The myth that human beings can use their minds to lift themselves out of the natural world...has been renewed (from Socratic and Platonic mystical philosophy) in a garbled version of the language of evolution."

Gray cites myth and illusion as metaphors for the human condition - the second section of the book quotes Freud acknowledging that his theories were grounded in "our mythological theory of instincts", and that the death instinct (the internal force that seeks to undermine individual achievement and health, and that finally defeats every life) may be a myth.

He also offers a version of dualism, echoing Freud's inner conflict and Eros/Thanatos models to decry the possibility of any real improvement in how humanity interacts with the natural world.  Why impossible ?   Because humanity is always divided against itself.

Gray thinks both meaning and progress are illusory concepts, and we maintain them only by clinging to omnipotent fantasies.  As a part of the animal world we need to accept our inability to understand why we are here.

Rorty (Philosophy and Social Hope 1999) is also pessimistic about the future of humanity.  He considers 19th century European liberalism the peak from which we have descended, such that by the end of the 21st century liberal democracy will be faded memory.

To paraphrase Rorty, attempts to keep something like God alive in the midst of a secular culture (based on the myth of reason ) were disengenuous. And to substitute Kant's mind dependent world for a faith dependent one may be misleading if it is thought to be  progress.

Is the concept of 'mind' the result of a belief in fantasy, a belief we depend on because of our hatred for the limitations of our reality, that is, our animal nature, awareness of our mortality and our painful inability to know what might be beyond us, or find meaning in our existence?  Another possibility is that 'mind' is conjured out of fantasies of self importance derived from the first months of life, as Melanie Klein suggests, only later modified by awareness of others and concern for them.

'Mind' is a word, and therefore a symbol, subject to disagreement about what it means while it depends on context to lend it meaning.

Rorty writes, 'As Hilary Putnam, the leading contemporary pragmatist, has put it:  "elements of what we call 'language' or 'mind' penetrate so deeply into reality that the very project of representing ourselves as being 'mappers' of something 'language-independent' is fatally compromised from the start."

Is 'mind' a conceptual space where we try to resolve inherent conflicts - a space for an attempt to reconcile the forces of life and death?  Such an attempt leads to oscillation - optimism/pessimism, faith/materialism, knowledge and resistance to knowledge.

We always fight against the acceptance that Gray advocates, in company with the Buddha.

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Thinking

Following on from the last post, some thoughts about non-thinking or anti-thinking. The danger is to ascribe this, non-thinking, to Trump alone. In line with this blog, we are trying to understand how what seems like a regressive state of being is actually a group phenomenon. Hans Thorner, one of the early commentators on the work of the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, wrote:

"...side by side with the desire for knowledge, there is the resistance to knowledge. Getting to know inevitably brings the individual into contact with objects that arouse displeasure. Hence tolerance to pain and displeasure is a precondition for the ability to think."

So the problem here in group terms is to define what are the objects that provoke to the extent that there is a retreat from knowledge.

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The end of enlightenment

We have thought about Trump and talked endlessly about the Trump phenomenon. What does it mean?  We are well aware of the links to Le Pen and Farage and no doubt others who represent a somewhat extreme right wing position. In many of our conversations we have struggled to make sense of the politics of these demagogues.

We found the following useful:

http://www.vox.com/2016/9/29/12930730/mark-lilla-revolution-donald-trump-radical-islam-europe

Also this. The title says it all, 'Trump's Theater of Cruelty':

https://itself.wordpress.com/2016/10/10/trumps-theater-of-cruelty/

And yet, something is missing. There is something 'cruelly' solipsistic' about these individuals, notwithstanding their appeal to a certain electorate. So the issue is how to relate this solipsism to the group.

There are two rather different referents to the meaning of enlightenment. It can denote a move to individualism, and all that that signifies, such as the sovereignty of the consumer.

It can also denote the primacy of rationality without the backing of a religious foundation.

Kant is the supreme modern philosopher of this. He writes in the Critique of Pure Reason of a world that is mind dependent:

"... if I remove the thinking subject, the whole material world must at once vanish because it is nothing but a phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of ourselves as a subject, and a manner or species of representation."

One response to some of the problems implicit in this is in the work of the philosopher Donald Davidson. In his paper 'The second person' he explores what it is to interpret the language or speech of another person. Here he names the process 'triangulation', in terms of a child's relation to a table:

"It is a form of triangulation: one line goes from the child in the direction of the table, one line goes from us in the direction of the table, and the third line goes between us and the child. Where the lines from the child to table and us to table converge, 'the' stimulus is located. Given our view of child and world, we can pick out 'the ' cause of the child's response. It is the common cause of our response and the child's response."

This is an account of the construction and development of meaning, the acquisition of understanding of intention, one's own and that of another person, and of a shared reality.

What is acquired here is done through language, through the learning and use of concepts and in time, through high level abstractions.

Quite simply someone like Trump reverses this process. Part no doubt of the appeal, his appeal, is that it is simple. It is simple because what he authorises is not-thinking. And his power in this is purely a function of the unfortunate fact that it is harder to think than to not-think.

 

 

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